Unlike Yahoo, Google has had a long standing resistance to offering RSS feeds for Google News queries. Hacks have long abounded from Julian Bond's GNews2RSS, Ben Hammersley's Google to RSS using the Google SOAP API, and Steve Rubel's advice in "RSS Hack for Sites That Don't Offer Feeds".
In this spirit, Justin Pfister has created gnewsfeed. Filling out the form uses a script that converts a Google news query (example) into an RSS feed (example). "I welcome anyone in the world," he humbly proffers, "to use it in an effort to become a more informed public."
Poor Justin. He's looking for a job. Maybe Adam Smith, and the Google Alerts product team will hire Justin to build in the syndication that Google should have offered long ago (hint).
The Utah State Library has tested Bloglet and Movable Type notifications for syndicating RSS feeds via email. We're now in the process of testing a new perl utility written by Mike Brown that will email recently updated RSS feeds.
Movable Type supports "notifications" using Ben Trott's mt-add-notify.cgi. The blog administrator enters email addresses using the notifications screen.
Notifications are never sent automatically. The administrator of the blog can elect to send a notication of a particular posting to those on the list. After entering a new story, and saving it, the person publishing the story can send the entry along with an optional personalized message.
As used in this way, notifications have a very limited value. Users cannot self-subscribe and the process is not at all automated. There is no way to filter so that stories posted to particular categories can be sent to subscribers interested in those topics.
MT comes with a simple CGI script to allow visitors to add themselves to your notification list. You just have to enter this form script in the template HTML code where you want it to appear.
The process, however, is still manual and users are dependent on the story publishers to elect to and remember to send notifications. The visitor who subscribes in this way, doesn't get an email notification confirming the subscription, nor can she or he unsubscribe at will.
A second option for sending RSS channel stories to subscribers by email is to use Bloglet. Bloglet is a service developed by Monsur Hossain using Blogger's XML-RPC interface. Think of it as a RSS-to-email conversion subscription service. Anyone can register and enter the XML channel URL for any feed, and then receive the new headlines in a daily email message. It's very easy to register and add channels. Here's a typical bloglet email update:
Advantages of using Bloglet:
Limitations of Bloglet:
Girlie wrote a script for combining the above two methods.
I've place this experimental script here at RSS in Government with some minor modifications such as removing the notification url box.
My appreciation goes out to Monsur Hossain, Ben Trott, and Girlie for sharing this code.
In the next installment......
Some examples of customized 'RSS to Email' scripting in use by others.